Who are the Spanish poets of today? Antonio Gamoneda’s “Libro de los venenos” is a commentary on Andrés de Laguna’s sixteenth-century commentary on an ancient medical/pharmacological text of Dioscurides. Gamoneda reproduces, in three different type faces, Dioscurides’ text, Laguna’s commentary, and his own metacommentary, based on his own extensive reading of other ancient texts. The physical effects of poisons; insect and snake bites; attacks of rabid dogs; antidotes and treatments—this is great stuff. Gamoneda suggests we read it as a complex and engaging palimpsestic narrative. The language is very dense; I don’t in fact possess the technical knowledge of the subject matter to dechiper the text in its entirety. It is not a matter of looking up words in the dictionary: Gamoneda’s book is itself a kind of dictionary of poisonous substances and their corporeal effects. What makes such a work “poetry”? I don’t much care whether we call it that or not. To say that it is not poetry would imply that poetry is a “genre” rather than a mode of signification.